The amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1 percent exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity (4.1 billion people), reveals new Oxfam analysis published today ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers. The findings show that, a decade later, the super-rich continue to exploit offshore systems to evade taxes and conceal assets, highlighting the urgent need for coordinated international action to tax extreme wealth and end the use of tax havens.
Oxfam estimates that $3.55 trillion in untaxed wealth was stashed offshore in tax havens and unreported accounts in 2024. This sum exceeds the GDP of France and is more than twice the combined GDP of the world’s 44 least developed countries.
The richest 0.1 percent holds approximately 80 percent of all untaxed offshore wealth, or around $2.84 trillion. Within this tiny group, the ultra-wealthiest 0.01 percent holds roughly half ($1.77 trillion).
Wonder if there’s a way to force all outstanding Treasury notes outside of the country to need to return back to treasury for renewal or otherwise be written off at invalid debt.
Not while the people running the USA are the same people who hide their immense wealth overseas.
Given the last Panama paper and similar leaks it’s much broader than USA :(
It’s a global class issue.
When Ukraine ousted their previous dictator, the Planet Money podcast had a piece on how the Ukrainian presidential palace had been effectively looted, and traced the absurdly long chain of shell companies that kept the actual owner obscured.
Also, the Vox/Netflix documentary series “Explained” had a genuinely good episode about billionaires. One of the things they brought up was that oligarchs store a lot of money in US real estate, like super-expensive NY condos.
This book is good too. Started in Boston and part of why America even exists as a country.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-wealth-hoarders-how-billionaires-pay-millions-to-hide-trillions-chuck-collins/368ffa9fd0d2dc32?ean=9781509543496&next=t
It was nearly a decade ago when I saw this, but there was a documentary, I think it was called The Spider’s Web or something like that.
Basically it was about shell companies and “trusts,” mostly centered in the Virgin Islands, where billionaires were keeping their real wealth obscured in off-shore banks.
It was mostly focused on wealthy Brits who derived their generational wealth from colonialism. It was pretty interesting though.
The guy was doing some investigative journalism, but obviously he wasn’t let into any of the buildings, and once he started to attract notice he started receiving threats and stuff. But he traced money trails backwards and they basically never led to individual people who could be held accountable for the money or how it was used.
Looking back now, I wonder how much of Epstein’s wealth was in those banks…
Are there shadow billionaires? Billionaires who are not officially recognized as such because they do such a good job of hiding their wealth?
Oh yeah, I just mean academically. We would need to be on a much different anti oligarchy footing to actually implement. But in the meantime, I like to noodle out systems and mechanisms.
Let’s say we eventually get to a renewed trust buster energy like we used the last time we broke up the corporate giants long ago.
Is there anything we could realistically do even with full control of the government, or is that money basically propping up the entire interconnected world economy?
We need a global solution. The scale of economic power is larger than the scale of our democratically controlled political power. Nationalism won’t save us.
The problem is that most of these assets are digitally held. What we need is an anonymous type attack against these accounts, similar in style to what they did in Mr. Robot.
Make it near impossible for the government to claw the money back.
I dunno I think the problem is the billionaires hoarding the money not the government trying to claw some of the money back, but that’s just me.
If you write off Treasury notes we have to either accept that MMT is real and that we can print money when needed.
Or we’d need to destroy an equal amount of money to the treasury note.
Or if MMT isn’t accurate (unlikely) then we’d see inflation as the government would effectively be unsecuring it’s debts.
Well could we somehow do it via serial number on the notes maybe? Like let’s say we use the event to denote a switch to color money instead of green only. And then we say in 10 years, all green money is expired and worthless, so every note has to come back into the Treasury to get renewed, and at that time be potentially subjected to repatriation taxes.
Think something like that could work?
That would be a mechanism for doing it, I’m just pointing out that, according to most economic theories (which I think are wrong) money requires Treasury notes to exist, otherwise you’re printing money which most economists claim will cause inflation.